What is ‘Life’ and ‘Living’? All living organisms, from bacteria to plants and humans, regardless of its form, share a common set of features: they are made of cells which are the basic structural and functional units of life, use energy through metabolism, maintain an internal balance (homeostasis), grow and reproduce, respond to its environment, and can evolve over generations. These characteristics together distinguish living systems from non‑living matter or inanimate objects like rocks.
Living systems produce offspring, either asexually from a single parent or sexually from two parents. They pass on genetic material (DNA or RNA), which carries instructions that determine traits in the next generation. Populations of living organisms can undergo genetic change over generations, a process known as evolution. Through mechanisms like natural selection, life forms develop adaptations that improve their ability to survive and reproduce in specific environments.
Biologically however, the single most important “goal” of all living things is to survive long enough to reproduce and pass on their genetic information to the next generation. Survival (getting enough energy, avoiding harm, maintaining the body) serves this deeper objective of continuing the lineage of the organism or species. This is its basic function.
From bacteria that divide in two to plants that set seed and animals that produce offspring, reproduction is a universal feature of life.
Because the “goal” is ongoing reproduction, species are continually shaped by natural selection to better fit their environments. Adaptations in morphology, physiology, and behaviour — from drought tolerance in crops to camouflage in animals — are all strategies that ultimately support survival and reproduction.
“Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” – Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas, the well-known Welsh Poet penned these lines in 1947 and first published in 1951, and they capture the very essence of what we call ‘Life’.
All living organisms rage against the dying of the light.
That struggle has been playing out for 4.5 billion years, long before humans entered the story. Research leads us to believe that our planet Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago from cosmic dust under extreme heat, and after it cooled enough for liquid water and a stable atmosphere to form, a “primordial soup” created the conditions for life to emerge some 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago. Simple inorganic molecules (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen) combined under energy sources like lightning, UV radiation, hydrothermal heat, or volcanic activity to form organic compounds such as amino acids and nucleotides. Over time, these molecules self-organized into self-replicating systems. The earliest confirmed life forms were microscopic, single-celled organisms living in water. When cyanobacteria (a green blue algae that releases oxygen) evolved around 2.4 billion years ago and began photosynthesizing, oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, paving the way for more complex, energy-intensive life forms and eventually the first animals evolved roughly 800 million years ago. Primates emerged much earlier — some 55 to 90 million years ago — and from them, true apes appeared around 25 million years ago, with the lineage splitting into gibbons and great apes about 16-18 million years ago. The final divergence was about 8-9 million years ago, and humans became a distinct separate species about 300,000 years ago.
Plant life has an even longer history than animal life, beginning with simple algae in water roughly 700 million to 1 billion years ago and only reaching the trees, shrubs, and root crops we know today through a series of major evolutionary steps over hundreds of millions of years.
They started as simple, soft aquatic organisms with no roots, stems, or leaves, and took the momentous step from water onto land around 470 million years ago, starting as simple forms like mosses and liverworts that reproduced by spores rather than seeds, and after another 50 million years, they evolved, developing vascular tissue for transporting water and nutrients, allowing them to grow taller and develop true stems, roots, and leaves. This enabled the rise of the first trees by around 380-400 million years ago. Around 380 million years ago, seed ferns developed the first seeds, a major advance that let plants survive in drier conditions unsuitable for spore-based reproduction.
The most transformative step came around 140-125 million years ago when flowering plants evolved, introducing seeds enclosed in fruit and co-evolving with early pollinators like bees. These make up the vast majority of plant species available today, including nearly all flowering trees, shrubs, vegetables, and tuber-forming plants such as potatoes and turmeric.
Finally, grasses evolved relatively recently, around 60 million years ago. Tuber and root crops (existed for millions of years, however human cultivation and domestication of these plants, along with grains such as wheat, barley, rice, and millet, only began around 8,000 to 13,000 years ago, marking the dawn of agriculture.
The reason for the history lesson is to give us a sense of perspective of how long it took for us to evolve into what we are today.
Mankind, however, has gone beyond the need to merely survive. Human communities first started as a survival mechanism – for compared to the natural predators that roamed the world, human had little or no defence. Human life forms adapted their genetic profile to greater use of the brain and intelligence that allowed them to adapt and develop tools to dominate its environment. With this domination, life’s basic functions of survival and genetic adaption were no longer required as evolutionary criteria.
This intelligence also led to interference with the natural process of many of the life forms and life systems that humans required for their survival.
It started with the domestication of animals and then to their other food source – the land.
As food security increased, and the tools that mankind invented become more lethal, we became the greatest predators, despite our physical shortcomings.
With greater food security, mankind fulfilled its basic living goal and reproduced in such numbers that food produced by the methodology plant life systems followed were thought to be inadequate to fulfil its needs.
So, the land was cleared and mono-cropping introduced with seed selection being done by Mankind as opposed to by nature.
The environmental balance required to maintain life, in all its forms, took 4.5 billion years to evolve and interlink, in which each organism has its part to play in keeping the balance and allowing all their interconnected species to grow, adapt and reproduce.
The problem with monocropping is that it strips the soil of the specific nutrients the single crop repeatedly draws down. Wheat, for example, is a heavy nitrogen feeder, absorbing around 128-200 kg of nitrogen per hectare along with substantial potassium and phosphorus to build grain protein and support high biomass. Since it cannot fix its own nitrogen, repeated wheat cultivation steadily depletes soil nitrogen reserves and requires ongoing nitrogen fertilization to sustain yields. Synthetic fertilizers, especially nitrogen-based ones, that are required due to the depletion, further acidify the soil, disrupt its natural pH and nutrient balance, and starve the microbial food web, since unused nutrients leach away rather than cycling through soil life, reducing beneficial fungi, earthworms, and overall biodiversity and eliminating the diverse root systems and seasonal cover that normally build organic matter and prevent erosion.
With mono cropping, species-specific pests and diseases build up unchecked, forcing greater reliance on pesticides, which compounds the damage to soil biology and water quality. The cumulative effect is a shift from soil as a living, self-renewing ecosystem into a degraded, input-dependent medium that needs ever more chemical inputs just to sustain the same yields.
The damage to the environment and the fragile ecosystem that has been built over billions of years is in danger of being destroyed by our arrogance and incompetence.
We need to return to our roots, both figuratively and literally, by studying forest ecosystems where below the canopy, there are multiple layers of trees, plants, shrubs, grasses and tubers that create an ecosystem that is self-sustaining. We need to go back to multi-cropping with zero tillage and zero chemical fertilisers.
It can be done.
Masanobu Fukuoka, an acclaimed Japanese farmer and philosopher, trained as a microbiologist and agricultural scientist specialising in Plant Pathology, and during WWII worked at the Kōchi Prefecture agricultural experiment station on farming research and food production, before moving away from ‘western’ farming methods. He created a natural farming system that rejuvenates soil by stopping mechanical and chemical disturbance and letting plant–animal–microbial cycles rebuild organic matter, structure, and biodiversity, thereby creating a stable habitat where the basic functions of “life” (energy use, growth, reproduction, response, evolution) can flourish. Fukuoka’s method is often summarized in four practical rules: no ploughing, no chemical fertilizers or compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no chemical pesticides. These rules deliberately reduce human interference so that roots, soil fauna, and natural plant succession can rebuild the soil’s structure and fertility. He articulated and validated his natural farming method in his book ‘One Straw Revolution’ that was published in 1975.
The key to going back to Nature’s way for farming is its extraordinarily sophisticated system into seeds that allows them to “know” exactly when to germinate — without any human help. Seeds don’t germinate immediately after falling from a plant. Instead, they enter dormancy. This means they go to sleep and remain inactive until a set of environmental signals confirms it is the right time and place to sprout. This also prevents all seeds from germinating at the same time, reducing competition and improving the group’s collective survival. Seeds track temperature, moisture, light and soil gases and break their dormancy when conditions suit its survival. Different plants require different triggers to remove their ‘dormancy lock’, cold weather followed by warmth; rains; wildfires, and physical abrasion. Once it is lifted, germination is a simple process.
This entire system, from dormancy, environmental sensing, and staggered germination, is the result of millions of years of natural selection, fine-tuned so that each species germinates precisely when its local climate offers the best chance of survival and reproduction. This system offers some of the most powerful lessons for natural farming, and that farming works best when it mimics rather than fights natural processes.
Modern industrial agriculture typically forces germination through synthetic chemicals and controlled environments. Natural farming, by contrast, recognizes dormancy as a feature, not a bug. Allowing seeds to go through their natural dormancy cycle — cold stratification in winter-grown crops, wet-dry cycles in monsoon crops — produces stronger seedlings because the embryo is fully prepared.
Nature never leaves soil bare. Its soil seed bank, layers of dormant seeds waiting for the right signal, only functions in undisturbed, microbe-rich soil. Industrial tillage destroys this bank. Seeds evolved to read temperature, moisture, and light as seasonal signals. The practical lesson for natural farming is bioregional seed selection — choosing or breeding varieties whose dormancy triggers match local climate rhythms precisely. A seed variety from Punjab’s wheat belt may have different stratification needs than one from Madhya Pradesh’s Malwa plateau. Indigenous seed varieties preserved by farming communities encode this local climate memory over centuries of selection.
This is exactly why heirloom seeds are so important for our future food and environmental security.
India’s traditional multi-crop farming systems represent one of the world’s most sophisticated indigenous approaches to food security, ecological resilience, and soil health — developed over millennia of observation and refinement. Its three-season rotation ensured continuous land use without exhausting soil, as different crops drew on different nutrient profiles and soil depths.
However, many communities in India followed nature’s way. The most iconic multi-crop system among them is Barahnaja (बारह अनाज, “twelve grains”) from the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand — one of the most sophisticated polyculture systems in the world. Rather than growing 12 crops sequentially, Barahnaja involves sowing 20 or more native varieties at the same time in the same field — including cereals, lentils, oilseeds, millets, vegetables, and medicinal herbs. All are sown together at the monsoon onset and harvested at different times across the season.
This same multi-crop logic appears across India’s regions:
The Kurwa (Paharia community) in Jharkhand’s Rajmahal Hills: up to ~40 crops; cereals, pulses, vegetables over multi-year plots.
The Kurichia tribe in Wayanad, Kerala’s Ponamkuthu: oilseeds, cucurbits, and minor millets in shifting cultivation.
Bhuj/Rammolin Kachchh, Gujarat: 7-crop system: mixed field crops adapted to arid conditions.
Deccan/Central India: mixed cereal-pulse intercropping: sorghum/bajra mixed with tur dal, groundnut, or horsegram — no one crop dominates.
These systems encoded deep ecological knowledge. Crops were selected and arranged to fulfil specific roles: Nitrogen fixers (legumes) alongside nitrogen consumers (cereals). Tall canopy crops providing shade for low-growing, shade-tolerant crops. Deep-rooted crops accessing subsoil moisture alongside shallow-rooted crops using topsoil. Early-maturing crops providing food during the hunger season before main crops are ready.
This is essentially what we now call functional biodiversity — every plant playing an ecological role.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s–70s systematically replaced these polycultures with high-yielding monocultures of wheat and rice, dismantling centuries of seed diversity. Subsidized PDS supply of uniform rice and wheat made communities progressively abandon their multi-crop traditions. Even after India achieved food security and the need to continue its destructive methodologies no longer existed, our policy makers continued with the same policies, and have poisoned vast tracts of the country’s land.
It is not too late to reverse track. The Joint declaration of the BRICS Ministers of Agriculture on 13th June, 2026 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh recognised the role of farmers as custodians of traditional knowledge and seed heritage; and also recognised the importance of regenerative agriculture.
The production differential between monocropping and multi-cropping is one of the most well-researched and debated questions in modern agronomy. The standard scientific measure for comparing the two systems is the Land Equivalent Ratio (LER); i.e. how much monoculture land would you need to produce the same total output as one unit of multi-cropped land? Research generally finds multi-cropping LERs between 1.2 and 2.0+, meaning monocultures need 20–100% more land to match the total output of a well-designed multi-crop system. Not all multi-crop systems outperform monocultures equally. However, when the planting design is local and properly planned, it will always win.
Monoculture wins on single-crop peak yield in a good year with full inputs. Multi-cropping wins on virtually every other dimension: total land productivity, economic returns, soil health, climate resilience, nutritional diversity, and input efficiency; the most important considerations for small and marginal farmers in rainfed dryland regions.
Can we accept that nature knows best and go back to our roots?
The three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — collectively claim approximately 56% of the world’s population, with about 2.5 billion Christians, 2.5 billion Muslims, and 18-20 million Jews. Christianity and Islam both emerged from Judaic roots, with Christianity developing in the 1st century CE as a Jewish sect centred on Jesus of Nazareth, and Islam arising in the 7th century CE, explicitly acknowledging and building upon both earlier traditions.
All three religions trace their spiritual lineage to the patriarch Abraham and share fundamental theological positions including monotheism, divine revelation through prophets, and ethical frameworks rooted in ancient Hebrew scripture. Judaism emerged around 2,000 BCE in the Middle East as an ethnic-religious tradition confined within specific tribal communities.
Despite its numerical insignificance today (only 0.2% of the world’s population), the theological frameworks, ethical systems, and cosmological narratives developed by these ancient tribes now shape the worldview of billions through Christianity’s 31.1% and Islam’s 24.1% of global population. To understand the West & the Middle East one needs to understand the history of the most powerful influence on their civilisations and worldview.
Ancient Israel’s Tribal Context
The ancient Israelites organized themselves around twelve kinship-based tribes descended from Jacob’s sons, operating as a confederation of loosely allied groups that controlled parcels of land independently. These tribes — Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin, Ephraim, and Manasseh — emerged in the harsh environment of the ancient Near East, where survival necessitated military prowess and territorial defence. The tribal structure was fluid and competitive, with loyalties often conflicting with centralized state interests even after the establishment of the monarchy in the 11th century BCE.
Warfare and Violence in Hebrew Scripture
The Old Testament contains extensive passages commanding and describing violence against surrounding peoples. God explicitly commands Moses to “harass the Midianites, and smite them,” resulting in the slaughter of “every male” and the taking of women and children as captives. The practice of ‘herem’ warfare’ (Holy War) was particularly brutal — this form of total warfare required everything and everyone in conquered areas to be “set apart for destruction,” leaving no survivors. The Book of Joshua describes how “He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” when subduing the hill country, Negev, and western foothills.
Deuteronomy 20:16-17 explicitly commands: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite.” The prophet Amos references war crimes of surrounding peoples, including the Ammonites who “ripped open pregnant women in Gilead in order to enlarge their territory,” using these examples to condemn Israel’s own injustices. Biblical scholars note that while these commands appear immoral by modern standards, they reflected common practices in the ancient Near East, where warfare typically involved battlefield rape, mutilating captives, blinding prisoners, impaling live victims, and flaying people alive.
Slavery and Human Commodification
The Mosaic Law explicitly permitted slavery with detailed regulations distinguishing between Hebrew and foreign slaves. Exodus 21:2-6 stipulated that Hebrew slaves served six years before freedom, but if a master gave him a wife during servitude, the wife and children remained the master’s property — forcing the slave to choose between freedom and family. Foreign slaves faced harsher conditions: Leviticus 25:44-46 explicitly authorized Israelites to purchase slaves from surrounding nations and bequeath them as inheritable property to their children. Exodus 21:20-21 stated that if a master beat a slave who died immediately, the master faced punishment, but if the slave survived a day or two before dying, no penalty applied “for the slave is his money”.
Particularly disturbing were laws concerning daughters sold into slavery. Exodus 21 stipulates that fathers could sell their daughters into servitude with the expectation they would become wives or concubines to their master or his sons. Young girls were frequently purchased with the intention of making them into prostitutes upon reaching maturity. If the master found her displeasing and didn’t marry her or give her to his son, he couldn’t sell her to foreigners but had to allow redemption, though she had no automatic right to freedom like male slaves.
Capital Punishment for Trivial Offenses
Old Testament law prescribed death by stoning for numerous offenses that seem extraordinarily disproportionate by modern standards. Blasphemy — cursing God’s name — required the entire congregation to stone the offender to death, whether foreigner or native-born. In Numbers 15:32-36, a man caught gathering wood on the Sabbath was brought before Moses, and God commanded the entire community stone him to death. Adultery required both parties be stoned, and if a betrothed virgin had sexual relations within city limits, both she and the man were stoned, the assumption being she could have cried for help.
The law even prescribed stoning for rebellious children. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 stated that if a son was stubborn and disobedient to his parents, refusing to obey after discipline, the parents could bring him to the city elders, and “all the men of his city shall stone him to death”. Worshiping other gods, even in private, warranted stoning (Deuteronomy 17:2-5), as did practicing divination or witchcraft.
Obsessive Purity Laws and Women’s Bodies
Leviticus contains extensive regulations treating normal biological functions as spiritually contaminating. A menstruating woman was declared “unclean” for seven days, and anyone who touched her became unclean until evening (Leviticus 15:19-24). Sexual intercourse during menstruation was strictly forbidden and punishable by ‘karet’ (divine excision or cutting off from the community). After childbirth, women were considered ceremonially unclean for seven days if they bore a son, but fourteen days for a daughter, followed by 33 additional days of “blood purification” for a son or 66 days for a daughter — during which they couldn’t touch holy things or enter the sanctuary.
The legal codes contained numerous seemingly arbitrary rules that governed daily life with obsessive detail. Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11 prohibited wearing garments mixing wool and linen — animal and plant products. The same passage forbade sowing fields with two kinds of seed and breeding different kinds of cattle, possibly directed against “idolatrous practices” of fire-worshippers who accompanied such mixing with magical rites. These regulations created a framework where spiritual status depended on fabric choices, agricultural practices, and menu selections rather than ethical behaviour toward fellow humans.
Christianity’s Separation from Judaism
Christianity’s separation from Judaism was a gradual process spanning several centuries, not a single dramatic break, with pivotal theological and political developments beginning in the 1st century CE. Christianity originated as a movement entirely within Judaism, with Jesus, his disciples, Paul, and most New Testament writers all being Jews. The most significant early turning point occurred around 50 CE at the Council of Jerusalem, where early church leaders debated whether Gentile converts needed to follow Mosaic Law, particularly circumcision. Paul argued that Gentiles could be included in God’s covenant through faith in Christ alone, exempting them from circumcision and most Jewish commandments.
Political circumstances accelerated the separation during the late 1st century. During Emperor Domitian’s reign (81-96 CE), enforcement of the ‘fiscus Judaicus’ — a tax all Jews were required to pay — created a crisis for Christians. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE further deepened the divide, as the two groups interpreted this catastrophic event differently. By the mid-2nd century CE, Christianity began formally distinguishing itself as a separate religion. Christian theologian Justin Martyr declared Christians as ‘verus Israel’ (the true Israel), claiming Christians had usurped the place of Jews as God’s chosen people. This supersessionist theology held that God had replaced divine favour of the Jews with the Christians.
Christian Offshoots and Old Testament Retention
While mainstream Christianity abandoned most Old Testament legal codes, several Christian movements founded in the 19th and 20th centuries reintroduced selective Old Testament practices, creating hybrid traditions that blend New Testament theology with ancient Hebrew law.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)
The Mormon church represents perhaps the most significant reintroduction of Old Testament practices into Christian theology. Mormon founder Joseph Smith instituted plural marriage (polygamy) in the 1830s-1840s, justifying it through Old Testament precedents where patriarchs like Abraham, Jacob, and David had multiple wives. The Mosaic Law regulated polygamy through passages like Exodus 21:10 (protecting first wives’ rights), Deuteronomy 21:15-17 (inheritance rules for polygamous families), and Leviticus 18:18 (prohibiting marrying sisters simultaneously). Smith’s ‘Doctrine and Covenants’ Section 132 explicitly framed polygamy as part of “God’s law of marriage,” claiming it was only permissible when commanded by God’s prophet for “raising up seed”.
Although the Mormon Church officially banned polygamy in 1890 under federal pressure and now prohibits it strictly, the church still practices “sealing” multiple women to a single husband in temple ceremonies and teaches that polygamy exists in the afterlife. Fundamentalist Mormon offshoots continue practicing polygamy today, maintaining the Old Testament practice that mainstream Mormonism abandoned only under duress.
The Mormon church also retained the Old Testament practice of tithing with particular strictness. Church doctrine emphasizes that tithing is “not a remote Old Testament practice but a commandment directly from the Savior” commanding members to pay “one-tenth of all their interest annually” as “a standing law unto them forever” (Doctrine and Covenants 119:4). The church frames tithing as “fundamentally a law of obedience” and a test of faith, directly citing Malachi 3:10’s command to “bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse”.
Additionally, the Mormon “Word of Wisdom” (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89) functions as a dietary code somewhat analogous to Levitical dietary restrictions, though with different specifics. It prohibits consumption of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea (“hot drinks”), encourages eating meat sparingly and consuming fruits seasonally, and emphasizes grain (especially wheat) as “the staff of life”. Members who keep the Word of Wisdom are promised health and that “the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel” — an explicit parallel to the Passover narrative.
Seventh-day Adventists
The Seventh-day Adventist church maintains strict observance of the Saturday Sabbath, arguing that the 4th commandment to “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8-11) remains binding on Christians. Adventists distinguish between the “Law of God” (the Ten Commandments) which they claim remains eternal, and the “Law of Moses” (ceremonial laws) which was abolished at Christ’s death. They observe the Sabbath from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, refraining from work and secular activities, arguing that God “blessed and sanctified” the seventh day at creation and made it “the sign of allegiance between man and Himself”.
This represents a direct continuation of Old Testament practice that mainstream Christianity abandoned in favour of Sunday worship. Adventists cite Luke 23:56, noting that even after Christ’s death, disciples “rested the sabbath day according to the commandment”.
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions based on Old Testament prohibitions against consuming blood, applying ancient dietary laws to modern medical procedures. They cite Genesis 9:4 (God’s command to Noah not to eat “flesh with its life, that is, its blood”), Leviticus 17:13-14 (requiring blood to be poured out and covered), and Deuteronomy 12:23-25 (“the blood is the soul and you must not eat the soul with the flesh”). The organization argues that “the law God gave to Noah made it unlawful for anyone to eat blood, that is, to use it for nourishment or to sustain life,” and extends this prohibition to blood transfusions, stating that “this prohibition includes taking it into the body either orally or intravenously”.
This interpretation treats a Bronze Age dietary restriction from the Holiness Code — designed to maintain ritual purity in ancient Israel — as applicable to 21st century emergency medicine, with potentially fatal consequences for adherents who refuse life-saving transfusions.
Modern Perpetuation in Islam and Orthodox Judaism
While Christianity largely abandoned Old Testament legal codes (with notable exceptions in certain offshoots), both Orthodox Judaism and Islamic Sharia law have preserved and adapted many of these ancient practices, creating modern religious frameworks that perpetuate Bronze and Iron Age social norms.
Islamic Sharia and Old Testament Parallels
Islam retained and formalized many Old Testament punishments through the ‘hudud’ (fixed punishments prescribed by Allah). Stoning to death for married adulterers remains part of Islamic law, despite the Quran itself prescribing only 100 lashes for ‘zina’ (adultery/fornication). This punishment comes from the Hadith traditions, with the Prophet Muhammad reportedly saying he feared people would forget stoning and “go astray by abandoning this duty prescribed by Allah”. The execution method mirrors Old Testament practice: The convicted person is placed in a pit and partially buried so they cannot escape before the community stones them to death.
Perhaps most troubling is that slavery remains “theologically permissible” in Islamic jurisprudence, though rarely practiced openly today. The Quran repeatedly uses the phrase “your spouses or those whom your right hands possess” (meaning owned slaves) when discussing sexual propriety, making slavery “structurally central to the Quran’s sexual ethics”. Under classical Sharia, a female slave is considered her master’s sexual property — he may have intercourse with her without marriage or consent, provided basic rules about menstruation are respected.
The Closing of the ‘Gates of Reason’ and Absence of Reform
A critical factor distinguishing Islamic tradition from its Abrahamic counterparts is the effective cessation of ‘ijtihad’ (independent legal reasoning) after the 9th and 10th centuries, often described as “the closing of the gates of ‘ijtihad’. From the 3rd to 9th century, Islamic jurisprudence had crystallized into established schools of law, and jurists increasingly emphasized ‘taqlid’ (imitation of earlier authorities) over independent reasoning. The historian Ibn Khaldun (14th century) argued that by his era, anyone claiming to exercise independent ‘ijtihad’ “would be frustrated and have no adherents” because jurisprudence had become complete and fixed.
This stagnation meant that as ‘taqlid’ gained pre-eminence, the Shari’ah “lost its dynamism and the Muslim community gradually began to stagnate”. The restoration of ‘ijtihad’ became recognized as “an essential step” toward renewal, but orthodox resistance to reopening independent reasoning created structural barriers to reform. While modern Islamic reform movements emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries — led by figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida — these efforts faced fierce opposition from traditional religious establishments and failed to fundamentally transform Islamic legal frameworks. Even contemporary reformists “don’t have any support and they’re not allowed to take things into their natural conclusions,” with any “reformation that actually translates into a deformation” being opposed.
Syncretism Outside Congregational Practice
Significantly, whatever liberal or adaptive elements exist within Islamic practice have emerged primarily through syncretism with local civilizational traditions — absorbed outside formal congregational and orthodox practice. Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, became “highly syncretistic” by freely blending traditional local ideas with Muslim concepts. In Central Asia, Sufi missionaries deliberately created “syncretic blending” by recognizing shamanistic Turkic heritage — reverence for sky (Tengri), fire, water, and ancestor spirits — and relating these to Islamic monotheism and saint veneration. This “syncretic fusion of Sufism and folk oral tradition” functioned as a “cultural bridge” that allowed Islamic ideals to permeate society while simultaneously preserving pre-Islamic values.
In India’s Assam region, the 17th-century Sufi Azan Fakir married a local Ahom woman, learned the indigenous language, and imbibed Vaishnavite saint Sankerdeva’s teachings and music, creating devotional songs (‘Zikr’ and ‘Jari’) that promoted syncretic culture. Orthodox Muslims complained his teaching was “against Islamic faiths and corrupting the people,” illustrating tension between syncretism and orthodoxy. Similarly, Kerala’s Islam became “intrinsically blended with religious harmony and syncretic culture,” while Kashmir’s Islamic religious architecture extensively incorporated traditional Kashmiri motifs like lotus flowers.
Crucially, Sufism is described as “more contemplative, mystical, individualistic, syncretistic, and non-legalistic than someone who is an orthodox Muslim”. This syncretism occurred precisely because it operated outside rigid congregational orthodoxy, absorbing “traditional African ideas,” indigenous Arabian practices, and local cultural customs into Islamic spirituality. The Arab religion of Islam was “transformed into a dynamic, flexible and syncretic” variant wherever it encountered robust local civilizations with their own sophisticated spiritual traditions. Yet orthodox Islam consistently viewed these syncretic practices with suspicion, labelling them “folk Islam” that deviated from pure Islamic practice.
The pattern is unmistakable: orthodox, congregational Islam preserved the rigid legal frameworks inherited from 7th century Arabia and ancient Hebraic law, while only the mystical, non-legalistic, and culturally adaptive margins — operating outside formal religious authority — developed humanizing and pluralistic practices by absorbing local civilizational wisdom.
Menstrual Purity Laws Across Traditions
Orthodox Jewish communities maintain strict ‘niddah’ (menstrual separation) laws throughout marriage. During menstruation and for seven “clean days” afterward, couples cannot have any intimate contact. Women sleep in separate beds, wear white nightgowns and underwear during the seven clean days, and check twice daily with special cloths to confirm they’re not bleeding. Only after counting seven clean days and immersing in a ritual bath (mikvah) is a woman considered pure enough for marital relations to resume.
Menstruating women in Islam are forbidden from performing prayers (salat), touching the Quran, fasting during Ramadan, and having sexual intercourse. They are prohibited from staying in mosques, though some modern scholars permit passing through or attending educational classes if proper hygiene materials are used. Orthodox Christian practice regarding menstruation varies by region and is less systematically enforced. Some traditions prohibit menstruating women from kissing icons or touching sacred objects, though officially the Church teaches communion is permissible during menstruation.
Christian Abandonment of Old Testament Law
Orthodox Christianity explicitly does not follow Old Testament ceremonial and civil laws. The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) established that Gentile Christians need not follow Mosaic Law, and Christian theology holds that Jesus fulfilled the Old Covenant, replacing it with a “new covenant in [his] blood”. While Christianity preserves the Ten Commandments as moral guidelines, it abandoned the purity laws, dietary restrictions, stoning punishments, and slavery regulations. This represents a significant theological departure from its Judaic origins.
Contrast with Asian Religious and Spiritual Frameworks
The religious traditions of Asia — primarily Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, and Confucianism — developed along fundamentally different trajectories from the Abrahamic faiths, creating worldviews that diverge sharply in their conceptions of divinity, time, ethics, and the purpose of human existence.
Monotheism versus Polytheism and Non-Theism
Abrahamic religions are strictly monotheistic, believing in one omnipotent, omniscient Creator God who demands exclusive worship. Judaism declares “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Christianity maintains the Trinity as one divine essence, and Islam upholds the strictest monotheism with “There is no god but Allah”. This exclusivist monotheism historically led to violent suppression of polytheistic traditions and intolerance toward competing religious claims.
Asian religions operate on entirely different metaphysical foundations. Hinduism appears polytheistic with thousands of deities, but sophisticated Hindu theology views these as manifestations or faces of one supreme reality — Brahman, the “Unknowable Essence”. The Chandogya Upanishad states “Ekam eva advitiyam” meaning “There is but One without a second,” describing the ultimate reality (Parabrahman) as singular. What appear as gods (devas) are expressions or attributes of this supreme source, not independent deities.
Buddhism is fundamentally non-theistic — it neither affirms nor denies a creator god, instead focusing on the path to enlightenment through understanding suffering and its cessation. The Buddha explicitly avoided metaphysical speculation about ultimate origins, considering such questions irrelevant to liberation. Taoism similarly emphasizes alignment with the Tao (the Way), an impersonal cosmic principle rather than a personal deity. Confucianism is primarily a social and ethical philosophy concerned with harmonious relationships rather than theology.
Linear Time versus Cyclical Time
Abrahamic faiths view time as linear — history moves from creation toward an ultimate judgment day where individual souls face eternal reward or punishment based on their single lifetime. This creates urgency and finality: one life, one chance, eternal consequences. The afterlife is “a rectification” where “the moral arc of the universe… finally snaps into alignment with justice”.
Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) perceive time as cyclic, with individuals experiencing multiple births and deaths in the continuous cycle of samsara (rebirth). The concept of karma — the law of cause and effect — governs this cycle, where actions in one life determine circumstances in future lives. Liberation (‘moksha’ in Hinduism, ‘nirvana’ in Buddhism) comes not through divine judgment but through self-realization and cessation of the cycle of rebirth. This removes the urgency of eternal damnation and replaces divine judgment with personal responsibility across multiple lifetimes.
Confucianism largely avoids speculation about the afterlife altogether. Confucius stated “the afterlife was beyond human comprehension” and that humans should focus on promoting “ideal social relations” in this life rather than acting based on expectations of posthumous rewards or punishments. Ancestor worship in Confucianism honours the dead and cultivates filial piety, but ancestral spirits are believed to gradually disperse after several generations rather than persisting eternally.
Violence and Holy War versus Ahimsa (Non-Violence)
The Abrahamic scriptures — particularly the Old Testament but also the Quran — contain explicit divine commands for warfare, genocide, and violent punishment. As detailed earlier, ‘herem’ warfare required total destruction of conquered populations, and numerous offenses warranted execution. Islamic tradition includes concepts of jihad (struggle) which historically encompassed military expansion and religious warfare.
Asian religions, particularly Jainism and Buddhism, developed the principle of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) as a central ethical tenet. Jainism mandates complete non-violence for all adherents, extending even to avoiding harm to insects. Buddhism emphasizes compassion and non-harming as foundational to the spiritual path, though it acknowledges defensive warfare in certain contexts. Hinduism presents a more nuanced view — while generally upholding non-violence as the “highest duty” (‘ahimsa paramo dharma’), it acknowledges just wars and the warrior’s dharma (duty) in contexts like the Bhagavad Gita.
The Swaminarayan Hindu tradition explicitly states it “is non-proselytizing — it does not believe in using force for religious ends” and discourages weapons except for defensive purposes. This stands in stark contrast to the Abrahamic history of forced conversions, Crusades, jihad, and religious persecution.
Exclusivism versus Pluralism
Abrahamic religions are fundamentally exclusivist — they claim unique access to divine truth and typically view other religious paths as false or incomplete. Christianity traditionally teaches “no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), Islam declares itself the final and complete revelation, and Judaism maintains its status as God’s chosen people. This exclusivism has historically justified forced conversion, religious warfare, and persecution of “heretics.”
Asian religions have historically embraced religious pluralism and tolerance. German philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach and Ernst Troeltsch concluded that Hinduism and Buddhism “were the earliest proponents of religious pluralism and granting of freedom to the individuals to choose their own faith and develop a personal religious construct within it”. Jainism and Taoism have “always been inclusively flexible and have long favoured religious pluralism for those who disagree with their religious viewpoints”.
Religious syncretism — blending elements from different traditions — is common in Asia. Chinese folk religion incorporates Buddhist and Taoist elements with local beliefs, Cao Dai in Vietnam combines Buddhism, Christianity, and Taoism, and many Asian individuals practice multiple traditions simultaneously without perceiving contradiction. This pluralistic approach views different religions as “equally valid paths to truth or salvation” rather than competing claims requiring violent resolution.
Patriarchy and Social Hierarchy
Both Abrahamic and Asian traditions however, exhibit patriarchal structures and oppression of women, though manifested differently. While Abrahamic religions embedded patriarchy in divine law through menstrual purity codes, women’s subordination, and male religious authority, Asian religions developed their own problematic hierarchies.
Hinduism’s caste system creates rigid social stratification where birth determines one’s status, with lower castes and women facing double oppression. The Manusmriti prescribes that women “must be controlled and protected by male relatives,” asserting women should serve their father in childhood, husband in marriage, and son in old age. This “Brahmanical patriarchy” couples caste hierarchy with patriarchal control, giving upper-caste men power while women, particularly from lower castes, face systematic subordination.
However, Buddhism introduced significant reforms for its era. The Buddha declared women could attain enlightenment as Arhats and established orders of nuns, drawing criticism from other religious leaders. He asserted women could be wise and moral, allowed women to become independent householders without requiring male intermediaries, and granted women some control over domestic matters. While Buddhism still reflects ancient patriarchal contexts, its foundational teachings emphasize spiritual equality regardless of gender or caste.
Confucianism strongly emphasizes hierarchical relationships and filial piety, placing women in subordinate positions within family structures. Yet unlike Abrahamic divine commandments treating women as property or ritually impure, Confucian ethics focus on cultivating virtuous relationships rather than religious law enforcement.
Salvation, Liberation, and Human Purpose
Abrahamic religions emphasize salvation through divine grace, faith in God, and obedience to commandments, with the ultimate goal being eternal communion with God in paradise or avoidance of eternal damnation in hell. Individual salvation depends on divine judgment based on belief and conduct during one lifetime.
Dharmic religions seek liberation (‘moksha’ or ‘nirvana’) from the cycle of rebirth through self-realization, ethical living, meditation, and spiritual practice. The goal is not pleasing an external deity but achieving enlightenment about the nature of reality and self. Personal responsibility and spiritual development across multiple lifetimes replace divine judgment, and liberation comes through wisdom and practice rather than faith alone.
Confucianism focuses on cultivating virtue and harmonious social relations in this life, largely setting aside questions of salvation or afterlife as “beyond human comprehension”. The emphasis falls on ethical conduct, respect for tradition, and fulfilling one’s social role rather than achieving posthumous reward.
Conclusion
‘The Abrahamic Inheritance’ represents a remarkable historical transformation where the survival strategies, religious practices, and scriptural traditions of a small confederation of Middle Eastern tribes came to dominate much of human civilization’s moral and spiritual landscape. The laws reveal a worldview obsessed with maintaining boundaries — between pure and impure, Hebrew and foreigner, male and female, sacred and profane — using categories that appear completely arbitrary from any moral or rational perspective outside the specific cultural context of Iron Age Palestinian tribal societies.
Yet these frameworks, developed in response to the harsh realities of ancient Near Eastern survival, continue to influence the lives of billions through the three Abrahamic faiths that emerged from this singular tradition. Even within Christianity, which theologically rejected most Old Testament legal codes, modern movements have selectively reintroduced ancient practices — from Mormon polygamy and tithing to Adventist Sabbath observance and Jehovah’s Witness blood prohibitions — demonstrating the persistent gravitational pull of these ancient tribal norms across millennia of religious evolution.
The contrast with Asian religious frameworks highlights how radically different spiritual and ethical systems could have shaped global civilization. Where Abrahamic traditions emphasize exclusive monotheism, linear time, divine judgment, holy warfare, and religious exclusivism rooted in ancient tribal survival strategies, Asian traditions developed pluralistic, cyclical, non-violent, and philosophically diverse approaches to ultimate questions. That approximately 60% of humanity’s spiritual worldview till today derives from the harsh desert survival codes of twelve Iron Age tribes — rather than the pluralistic, karma-based, or humanistic frameworks that developed independently across Asia — represents one of history’s most consequential accidents of cultural transmission and imperial expansion.
Author’s Note: This essay was inspired by the conversations I have been having with my friend Professor Suraj Kumar from the School of Government & Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University for his course on ‘The Decline of the West’; as well as my explorations of ‘spirituality’ as the path forward for a shift in sustainability and economic policy toward a holistic, dharma‑anchored order harmonising ethics, economy, ecology, energy and employment, and work on the principle of “milking rather than exploiting” nature through well‑regulated use of resources, as envisioned by Pt. Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism.
India’s forests are facing rapid degradation due to various anthropogenic pressures, including climate change and extreme weather, particularly high heat levels, that have profound impacts on forests at multiple levels, ranging from cellular processes to ecosystem-wide effects. These impacts are both direct and indirect, altering the growth, structure, function, and resilience of forest ecosystems as well as depletion of the water table, with significant ecological and socioeconomic consequences.
However, evidence from across the country demonstrates that when tribal communities actively participate in forest management, degraded ecosystems can regenerate dramatically, benefiting both the environment and local livelihoods. Tribal communities play a critical role in forest regeneration, and highlighting successful models of participation, benefits, challenges, and policy frameworks can support these initiatives.
The State of Forest Degradation in India
India’s forest ecosystems have been under significant pressure for decades, resulting in extensive degradation. By the 1970s, it was estimated that India was losing more than one million (10 lakh) hectares of forest land annually due to commercial exploitation and growing local pressures. The rapid denudation and degradation of green cover continues to be a serious concern, with environmental pollution, encroachment of catchment areas, deforestation, and rampant mining activities causing soil erosion and ecological imbalance.
Source: ISFR 2023, Vol. 1
The blame for forest degradation often shifts between forest managers and forest-dwelling communities. However, research indicates that the activities of non-tribal populations often have a more significant impact on forest ecosystems than those of tribal communities who have traditionally lived in harmony with forests. The forest fringe areas inhabited by non-tribal populations show higher rates of degradation, with activities such as grazing, extensive fuelwood collection, illegal selling, and extraction of fodder, medicinal plants, sand, and rocks contributing significantly to forest loss.
This degradation directly affects the approximately 10 crore tribal and an estimated 15-20 crore other traditional forest dwellers (OTFDs) who depend on forest resources for their livelihoods, particularly in remote forest fringe villages. As forest resources are depleted, these communities face increasing poverty and suffering, losing access to crucial sources of fuel, fodder, food, raw materials for village industries, and medicines.
When India gained Independence in 1947, tribal communities were the most deprived in India, lacking knowledge of their rights in our new-found freedom, leading to an almost total bureaucratic control over their resources and rights, especially by the Forest department. Today, tribal youth are educated and aware of their rights, and their self-governance has been ratified by the Indian State and made statutory through the Forest Right Act, 2006, and participatory self-governance must be a priority for the government at both the State and Centre.
Wikipedia defines Fear as “an emotion induced by a perceived danger or threat, which causes physiological changes and ultimately behavioural changes, such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear in human beings may occur in response to a certain stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat perceived as a risk to oneself. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response), which in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) can be a freeze response or paralysis.”
Scientifically speaking, emotions such as fear, when stimulated, can result in an “abnormal excitation of the nervous network.” This causes biochemical alterations in the heart rate and neurosecretion. It can also interrupt the relationship between the peripheral nervous system and the brain. As is known, cerebral activity focuses on the source of the emotion. It can cause voluntary muscles to become paralyzed and sensory perceptions to be altered, sometimes causing us to feel physical pain. An ‘emotional state’ is generated when stimuli from emotions such as Fear activates the various parts of the brain (thalamus and cortex) that interact with the organs (viscera). If this exposure is chronic, the brain chemistry gets altered, and reaches a semi-permanent state of abnormality This causes depression and other phycological problems. As Fear is the most primary emotions in humans, it sustains far longer than any other emotion known to humans.
In simple English, Fear is one of the most powerful, natural and basic of human emotions. It triggers both an emotional and biological response. It alerts us to any danger, real or perceived, physical, physiological or emotional. Fear can also be caused by mental health issues.
The opposite of fear is courage. Bravery. To have fears is natural. To overcome one’s fears is to be brave. To be ‘Fearless’ is an unnatural state. That is why we have “Bravery’ awards and not ‘Fearless’ awards. Overcoming our fears leads to the path to success in any human endeavour.
The evolution of man and society could be said to be mainly triggered as a response to human fears.
The fear of the unknown – lighting, thunder, death, the dark, etc. – led man to evolve belief systems, in powers that could protect them. These ultimately became religions. Faith was and remains, for many, a bulwark against Fear.
The fear of the known – predators, both human and non-human, disease, earthquakes, volcanoes – led man to group together in tribes, as protection against these fears. These tribes became larger and evolved into societies, as communities were better equipped than individuals to fight common threats, and the fears that arose from the threats.
In times of major crisis – war, pandemics, etc. when sudden, untimely deaths occur more frequently than normal, families of those affected, suffer from fear induced psychosis, that leads to psychological problems as well as poor response to the same disease condition as they loved ones suffered from. This fear affects their recovery.
René Descartes, the French philosopher said, “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” For me, this statement is a validation of the ‘Power of the Mind’ to achieve any goal, including wellness.
The effect of Faith and Belief in recovery and ability of a person suffering from an ailment is well documented. Psychosomatic responses to disease conditions dictate the wellness of patients. Faith healers, defy science. Though most of them are unreliable, there have been irrefutable examples of people healing by believing in their ability to get well – against all odds. We call these miracles.
Our Faith or Belief could be in religion, in oneself or in the science and medical treatment that you receive. To believe that your medical condition can improve plays an important physical and physiological role in recovery.
It is said that Man is a social animal. His phycological strength is often derived from family, friends, and the community. In our current crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic, with ‘home isolation’ and ‘lockdown’ being the ‘go to’ disease control tool that Governments have used worldwide, they have eliminated one of the most powerful physiological support systems that any human has. While ill, there is no comfort as you are isolated. In death, you are denied the family and rituals that make death somewhat tolerable.
In our current crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic, since the 20th of March 2021, there has been 24 x 7 coverage in the media, especially the TV News channels, that has sensationalised human loss and human suffering with a frenetic, doomsday approach, only with an eye to grab TRP ratings, without any sense of social responsibility.
Nor have they taken a moment to examine the impact of their fear-mongering and relentless “Breaking News’ breathless, dramatic coverage on its viewers.
I have friends who have died from Covid-19. Young, healthy and who should never have died. When they fell ill, they were ‘quarantined’, with no human support to help them overcome the fear that had been instilled in them. They were fearful they would not recover and could not interact with those who could convince them otherwise. They were fearful that they would die and be cremated alone, and this fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They were so fearful that they did not recover. The fear led them to believe they had no hope of survival, and so they died. The medication did not help. Fear is contagious, and more people have caught it than the virus.
For this, I blame the media for their callous approach to COVID reporting. I blame the Government for not bringing them into control. For not stopping them from convincing their viewers that they have no chance of getting well, once they were ill.
Just some facts to give you some sense of perspective. Every day in India, approximately 27-30,000 people die, from various causes. This is even before we heard the word COVID-19 and Coronavirus. Of these, approximately 25,000 are cremated every day. During certain days in April/May 2021, the numbers rose from 25,000 to 27,000. As cremations take time, there were backlogs in some locations on some days. How did this human tragedy become a made for TV travesty? To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson of Fear and Loathing, “There are some things that you know in your heart that are truly ugly, and this is one of them.’
My advice to all. Believe you can defeat the disease. With the appropriate medication and your belief in your ability to recover, you will get well.
I would like to clarify that nothing that I write can take away from the immense, tragic human suffering caused by the current pandemic, and the grief of those who have lost their loved ones.
The medicinal properties of Clove, Laung in Hindi, and Devakusuma or ‘Flower of the Gods’ in Sanskrit, has been known in Ayurveda and Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Traces were found in vessels that date back to 1721 BC. It has been traded along the Indian spice route with ancient Rome for millennia. The Greeks and Romans used it as a food preservative and as a treatment for dental problems. It is an essential part of any Indian kitchen.
Cumin, or Jeera as it is known in India, has been used in traditional medicine and in kitchens from Egypt to India for thousands of years, for its curative properties, mainly for stomach, liver and digestive tract ailments. In fact, the root of the word Jeera is from ‘Jirna’, the Sanskrit word for digestion.
Garlic, a member of the onion family, originated in Central Asia. It is one of the healthiest foods on the planet, and its benefits were identified thousands of years ago. It was used in all the ancient civilisations, both for its taste and flavour, as well as for its medicinal properties. Continue reading →
Ginger is a basic ingredient of most Indian and Asian cuisines. Like pepper, it was one of the earliest spices traded from India with the Arabs and the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Black Pepper, often described, as black gold, was sought after not only in India where it originated, but also across ancient civilisations from the Egyptians and Romans; to Greece and China. The Malabar Coast in Kerala where pepper originated, has seen traders come to its shores from the 4th Century BC if not before with Roman and Arab traders.
